Facebook is fast becoming a popular way to publicize an organization’s event, invite guests, and track who plans to attend. Facebook Events may be just what your group needs — but could you be shutting out some of the people who might support your event, by relying solely on Facebook to manage it? The fact is, for non-members of the site, Facebook can feel like a frustrating series of closed doors.

In the Web2.0 world, where the emphasis is on shared information and open access, Facebook is something of an anomaly.  As a result, active users of Facebook may not always be aware of how limited the access is for non-members, especially if you’re automatically logged in when you visit the site and see it only from the member’s perspective.

Before you decide if the Facebook Events feature is the right tool for managing your organization’s event, try this: Bookmark your nonprofit’s Facebook Page, your personal Profile, a Group, a Discussion… then log out, and click back through your bookmarks to visit those pages. What information is still accessible, when you’re not logged in to a Facebook account?

Does it matter?

Let me tell you a true story…

A local nonprofit organized a benefit concert a few weeks ago, and the event should have been a hit — it should have been “standing room only.”  All the right pieces were in place. A popular band had volunteered to play, the cause was a good one, entry was by donation at the door, and the event was heavily promoted on Facebook: on the nonprofit’s Facebook Page and on that of the band, as well as by a good amount of sharing on the personal profiles of fans and supporters of both.

In addition, the nonprofit website and its newsletter included a link to the Facebook Event page where all the information about the concert had been posted. Members and mailing list contacts were sent invitations through Facebook, asking them to RSVP.

Yet, for all that effort, the event had a very disappointing turn-out. And the amount of money donated by those who did attend was barely enough to cover the cost of renting the hall.

What went wrong?

I became aware of this when a friend — a keen supporter of both the nonprofit and the band — complained about having to join up at Facebook in order to get even the most basic time-and-place information about the event. Because he was not already a Facebook member, the publicized Event link led only to the Facebook log-in/sign-up page.

In this case, an even larger stumbling block was that concert seating was limited, and available on a first-come, first-serve basis. Anyone who wanted to get in was required to confirm their attendance through the Facebook Event page. Effectively, that meant that this event was not “open to the public” as intended. It was open only to those who had received a direct invitation to the event, and to Facebook members: those who could access the Event page to register their intention to attend.

The lesson?

If you’re holding a public event, open those doors! Online event registration should make the process easier on the event organizers, yes, but also on those who wish to attend.  Not everyone is a member of Facebook; and not everyone wants to be compelled to register with a website that they might not otherwise choose to join.

That said, the Facebook Events feature has a lot going for it.

The limitations may or may not be an issue for your specific intended use. The key is to be aware of those limitations, so you can plan to work around them and find other ways to keep those doors open.

You can create an Event through your personal profile or through your nonprofit Page, whichever is most appropriate, then send a message to invite your friends and supporters, even if they are not Facebook members. To invite non-members, you’ll just need their email addresses. And non-members can RSVP by following a link that Facebook sends them in the invitation email.

The one big drawback here is that there’s no real way for non-members to know if they have successfully confirmed their attendance. At best, they may notice that the number of attending guests will change by one after they click the RSVP button. To actually view the guest list, however, to see if they appear on it — even if you’ve remembered to customize your Event to make the guest list visible to members — will still require them to login to a Facebook account.

(Ideally, there should be an automatic email confirmation, but at the very least I’d like to see some sort of onscreen acknowledgement that the event registration was successful. It’s common courtesy, for one thing; and it could save you a lot of time in replying to anxious follow-up emails!)

If you cancel your event, Facebook will automatically notify all your guests of the cancellation — a very convenient feature — and you have the option of adding a note to explain the situation.  If you simply make a change to the Event, however — change the date or location, or other important details — there’s no automatic notification from Facebook. But you do have the ability to “Message All Guests” to let them know of the change: Facebook users will receive a message in their on-site Inbox, while non-users will receive the same message by email.

So far, so good — but again, there’s a closed door for those who are not Facebook members. The email they receive will say, “To reply to this message, follow this link”  and the link will take them to a Facebook Inbox page for messages sent to the Event guests. To actually be able to post a reply to your message, however — guess what?  Again, a Facebook account is required.

We’ve talked before about the difference between a Profile and a Page on Facebook — and the advantages in setting up a nonprofit Facebook Page because it’s viewable by the public and can be listed in search engines. In other words, it is a way to open a door into the black box of Facebook for those who are not members.

Given that, here’s something a bit odd:

Even if you set up a Facebook Event through  your (public) nonprofit or business Page, rather than through your (private) personal profile, there seems to be no way to allow non-Facebook members to view the events listings on the Page, other than through that one-to-one invitation link. In short, even though your nonprofit Page is public, its Events box can only be seen by invited guests and logged-in Facebook members. 

Perhaps this will change, as Facebook continues to refine its new interface, but for now I see it as a fairly serious limitation to your ability to promote an event to the general public.

The bottom line?

If you’re throwing a private event for people you already know and are in regular contact with — particularly if that group is predominantly made up of Facebook regulars — the Facebook Events function may be just what you need. If you’re hosting a public event, however, all those closed doors may cut down on the number of people who are willing to jump through hoops to attend.

By all means, yes, do take advantage of Facebook Events as a way of reaching out to the Facebook members in your contituency and making it easy for them to help spread the word about your event. But until some of those closed doors open up for the non-Facebook world, and two-way communication is enabled, you may want to think twice before relying on Facebook alone for managing your guest list and online event registrations.